“What did you do yesterday?”
“Portenduere kept me to dinner,” he replied, “and after that we went to
the club to play whist.”
“That’s a foolish life, my Calyste,” said Sabine. “Young noblemen in
these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of the
country the ground lost by their fathers. It isn’t by smoking cigars,
playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent things
of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, nor yet by
separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and
providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist. Instead of
being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said. Ah!
if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I have
nursed and cradled your child! I’d like to see that grand old name of
Guenic become once more historical!” Then suddenly plunging her eyes
into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a pensive air, she
added: “Admit that the first note you ever wrote me was rather stiff.”
“I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club.”
“But you wrote on a woman’s note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine
elegance.”
“Those club directors are such dandies!”
The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle Mirouet,
had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so intimate that
they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments. The two young
women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this friendship by the
delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and confidences apropos of
their first infants.
While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, “I must
warn Savinien,” Sabine was thinking, “I am sure that paper bore a
coronet.” This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and
Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved
to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night before
she had flung into her letter-box.
After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should soon
return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages with one
horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient cabriolet
of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte’s house and
begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of fibbing in
case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste, urging his
coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order to know how
Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that unfortunate just
from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting with a very good
appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel ate her boiled eggs,
and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold service, a present from a
monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed a few ballads on _ideas_ of
the lord, who afterwards published them as his own!
Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose
great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he
rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but
it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse, a
present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat that
it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of those
chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine was at
a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste’s
non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse with
its foaming mouth surprised her.
“Where can he have come from?”
The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not exactly
consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes, shows us
the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures born of our
brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible of ideas.
“Where do you come from, dear angel?” Sabine said to Calyste, meeting
him on the first landing of the staircase. “Abd-el-Kader is nearly
foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been
waiting for you these three hours.”
“Well, well,” thought Calyste, who was making progress in dissimulation,
“I must get out of it by a present--Dear little mother,” he said aloud,
taking her round the waist with more cajolery than he would have used if
he had not been conscious of guilt, “I see that it is quite impossible
to keep a secret, however innocent, from the woman who loves us--”
“Well, don’t tell secrets on the staircase,” she said, laughing. “Come
in.”
In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught sight
in a mirror of Calyste’s face, on which, not aware that it could be
seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.
“Now for your secret?” she said, turning round.
“You have shown such heroism as a nurse,” he said, “that the heir
presumptive of the Guenics is dearer to me than ever, and I wanted
to give you a surprise, precisely like any bourgeois of the rue Saint
Denis. They are finishing for you at this moment a dressing-table at
which true artists have worked, and my mother and aunt Zephirine have
contributed.”
Sabine clasped him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast with
her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for the
piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark doubt. It
was one of those magnificent transports which can be counted, and which
no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend, or life would be too
soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at the feet of women to
adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments when the forces of the
heart and intellect gush forth like the waters of sculptured nymphs from
their inclining urns. Sabine burst into tears.
Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a
sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing heart
came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her nose at
his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of that letter
paper! Another woman’s head had lain there, whose hair and face had left
that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where the kisses of
her rival were still warm.
“What is the matter?” asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back to
consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her smell
salts.
“Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel
it. They won’t come at once unless you fetch them yourself--go!”
Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of the
porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked about the
salon as if beside herself, crying out, “My God! my God! my God!”
Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized
upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were
like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever. Her
boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try to
issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and cried
aloud, “I am dying!”
At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in.
After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the
first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend, Madame
de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her brain
like straws at the will of a waterspout. “I saw,” she said later,
“myriads all at once.”
She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found
strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one mad
desire--to have certainty:--
To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:
Dear Mamma,--When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you
will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by
which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for
doing my duty. I was already well repaid by my own happiness in
doing it. I can never express the pleasure you have given me in
that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall
try to do so. Believe me, when I array myself before that
treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest
jewel is our little angel, etc.
She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to post.
When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of
reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.
“Ursula, I think I am going to die,” she said.
“What is the matter, dear?”
“Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you yesterday?”
“Dined with me?” said Ursula, to whom her husband had said nothing, not
expecting such immediate inquiry. “Savinien and I dined alone together
and went to the Opera without Calyste.”
“Ursula, dearest, in the name of your love for Savinien, keep silence
about what you have just said to me and what I shall now tell you. You
alone shall know why I die--I am betrayed! at the end of three years, at
twenty-two years of age!”
Her teeth chattered, her eyes were dull and frozen, her face had taken
on the greenish tinge of an old Venetian mirror.
“You! so beautiful! For whom?”
“I don’t know yet. But Calyste has told me two lies. Do not pity me, do
not seem incensed, pretend ignorance and perhaps you can find out who
_she_ is through Savinien. Oh! that letter of yesterday!”
Trembling, shaking, she sprang from her bed to a piece of furniture from
which she took the letter.
“See,” she said, lying down again, “the coronet of a marquise! Find out
if Madame de Rochefide has returned to Paris. Am I to have a heart in
which to weep and moan? Oh, dearest!--to see one’s beliefs, one’s poesy,
idol, virtue, happiness, all, all in pieces, withered, lost! No God in
the sky! no love upon earth! no life in my heart! no anything! I don’t
know if there’s daylight; I doubt the sun. I’ve such anguish in my soul
I scarcely feel the horrible sufferings in my body. Happily, the baby is
weaned; my milk would have poisoned him.”
At that idea the tears began to flow from Sabine’s eyes which had
hitherto been dry.
Pretty Madame de Portenduere, holding in her hand the fatal letter, the
perfume of which Sabine again inhaled, was at first stupefied by this
true sorrow, shocked by this agony of love, without as yet understanding
it, in spite of Sabine’s incoherent attempts to relate the facts.
Suddenly Ursula was illuminated by one of those ideas which come to none
but sincere friends.
“I must save her!” she thought to herself. “Trust me, Sabine,” she
cried. “Wait for my return; I will find out the truth.”
“Ah! in my grave I’ll love you,” exclaimed Sabine.
The viscountess went straight to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, pledged her
to secrecy, and then explained to her fully her daughter’s situation.
“Madame,” she said as she ended, “do you not think with me, that
in order to avoid some fatal illness--perhaps, I don’t know, even
madness--we had better confide the whole truth to the doctor, and invent
some tale to clear that hateful Calyste and make him seem for the time
being innocent?”
“My dear child,” said the duchess, who was chilled to the heart by this
confidence, “friendship has given you for the moment the experience of a
woman of my age. I know how Sabine loves her husband; you are right, she
might become insane.”
“Or lose her beauty, which would be worse,” said the viscountess.
“Let us go to her!” cried the duchess.
Fortunately they arrived a few moments before the famous _accoucheur_,
Dommanget, the only one of the two men of science whom Calyste had been
able to find.
“Ursula has told me everything,” said the duchess to her daughter, “and
you are mistaken. In the first place, Madame de Rochefide is not in
Paris. As for what your husband did yesterday, my dear, I can tell you
that he lost a great deal of money at cards, so that he does not even
know how to pay for your dressing-table.”
“But _that?_” said Sabine, holding out to her mother the fatal letter.
“That!” said the duchess, laughing; “why, that is written on the Jockey
Club paper; everybody writes nowadays on coroneted paper; even our
stewards will soon be titled.”
The prudent mother threw the unlucky paper into the fire as she spoke.
When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the duchess, who had given
instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine
to the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the _accoucheur_ and
Calyste in the salon.
“Sabine’s life is at stake, monsieur,” she said to Calyste; “you have
betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide.”
Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.
“And,” continued the duchess, “as you do not know how to deceive, you
have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the truth.
But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not wish the
death of my daughter, I am sure--All this, Monsieur Dommanget, will put
you on the track of her real illness and its cause. As for you, Calyste,
an old woman like me understands your error, though she does not pardon
it. Such pardons can only be brought by a lifetime of after happiness.
If you wish me to esteem you, you must, in the first place, save my
daughter; next, you must forget Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth
having once. Learn to lie; have the courage of a criminal, and his
impudence. I have just told a lie myself, and I shall have to do hard
penance for that mortal sin.”
She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever
physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her symptoms
the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the success
of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste sitting at
the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an expression of
tenderness.
“So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?” Sabine
said to him in a feeble voice.
The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble, and
they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as red as
a cherry.
“That’s what comes of nursing a child,” said Dommanget brutally, but
cleverly. “Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and they
go to the club and play. But you needn’t worry over the thirty thousand
francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night--”
“Thirty thousand francs!” cried Ursula, in a silly tone.
“Yes, I know it,” replied Dommanget. “They told me this morning at the
house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur
de Trailles who won that money from you,” he added, turning to Calyste.
“Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well
believe you are ashamed of it.”
Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a
happy woman, and the old _accoucheur_, a confirmed egotist, all three
lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste
understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled from
his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.
“Monsieur,” she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at
Dommanget, “Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred
thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to
think it wrong or read him a lesson. It is far better that Monsieur
de Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de
Trailles’.”
Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks
and whispered:--
“Sabine, you are an angel!”
Two days later the young wife was thought to be out of danger, and the
next day Calyste was at Madame de Rochefide’s making a merit of his
infamy.
“Beatrix,” he said, “you owe me happiness. I have sacrificed my poor
little wife to you; she has discovered all. That fatal paper on which
you made me write, bore your name and your coronet, which I never
noticed--I saw but you! Fortunately the ‘B’ was by chance effaced. But
the perfume you left upon me and the lies in which I involved myself
like a fool have betrayed my happiness. Sabine nearly died of it; her
milk went to the head; erysipelas set in, and possibly she may bear the
marks for the rest of her days.”
As Beatrix listened to this tirade her face was due North, icy enough to
freeze the Seine had she looked at it.
“So much the better,” she said; “perhaps it will whiten her for you.”
And Beatrix, now become as hard as her bones, sharp as her voice, harsh
as her complexion, continued a series of atrocious sarcasms in the same
tone. There is no greater blunder than for a man to talk of his wife, if
she is virtuous, to his mistress, unless it be to talk of his mistress,
if she is beautiful, to his wife. But Calyste had not received that
species of Parisian education which we must call the politeness of the
passions. He knew neither how to lie to his wife, nor how to tell his
mistress the truth,--two apprenticeships a man in his position must make
in order to manage women. He was therefore compelled to employ all the
power of passion to obtain from Beatrix a pardon which she forced him to
solicit for two hours; a pardon refused by an injured angel who raised
her eyes to the ceiling that she might not see the guilty man, and who
put forth reasons sacred to marquises in a voice quivering with tears
which were furtively wiped with the lace of her handkerchief.
“To speak to me of your wife on the very day after my fall!” she cried.
“Why did you not tell me she is a pearl of virtue? I know she thinks you
handsome; pure depravity! I, I love your soul! for let me tell you,
my friend, you are ugly compared to many shepherds on the Campagna of
Rome,” etc., etc.
Such speeches may surprise the reader, but they were part of a system
profoundly meditated by Beatrix in this her third incarnation,--for at
each passion a woman becomes another being and advances one step more
into profligacy, the only word which properly renders the effect of the
experience given by such adventures. Now, the Marquise de Rochefide had
sat in judgment on herself before the mirror. Clever women are never
deceived about themselves; they count their wrinkles, they assist at the
birth of their crow’s-feet, they know themselves by heart, and even
own it by the greatness of their efforts at preservation. Therefore to
struggle successfully against a splendid young woman, to carry away from
her six triumphs a week, Beatrix had recourse to the knowledge and the
science of courtesans. Without acknowledging to herself the baseness of
this plan, led away to the employment of such means by a Turkish
passion for Calyste’s beauty, she had resolved to make him think himself
unpleasant, ugly, ill-made, and to behave as if she hated him. No system
is more fruitful with men of a conquering nature. To such natures the
presence of repugnance to be vanquished is the renewal of the triumph of
the first day on all succeeding days. And it is something even better.
It is flattery in the guise of dislike. A man then says to himself, “I
am irresistible,” or “My love is all-powerful because it conquers her
repugnance.” If you deny this principle, divined by all coquettes and
courtesans throughout all social zones, you may as well reject all
seekers after knowledge, all delvers into secrets, repulsed through
years in their duel with hidden causes. Beatrix added to the use of
contempt as a moral piston, a constant comparison of her own poetic,
comfortable home with the hotel du Guenic. All deserted wives who
abandon themselves in despair, neglect also their surroundings,
so discouraged are they. On this, Madame de Rochefide counted, and
presently began an underhand attack on the luxury of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, which she characterized as stupid.
The scene of reconciliation, in which Beatrix made Calyste swear and
reswear hatred to the wife, who, she said, was playing comedy, took
place in a perfect bower where she played off her graces amid ravishing
flowers, and rare plants of the costliest luxury. The science of
nothings, the trifles of the day, she carried to excess. Fallen into a
mortifying position through Conti’s desertion, Beatrix was determined
to have, at any rate, the fame which unprincipled conduct gives. The
misfortune of the poor young wife, a rich and beautiful Grandlieu,
should be her pedestal.